


Start Again From The Beginning

by altschmerzes



Series: House Rules 'Verse [1]
Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, First Day of School, First Meetings, Friendship, Gen, Moving, Roommates, sort of a found family origin story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-13 15:27:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21156752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altschmerzes/pseuds/altschmerzes
Summary: On the first day of his freshman year at Las Vegas State University, Nick Stokes feels apprehensive and lost on the huge campus in the huge, unfamiliar city, and meets his new roommate, Warrick Brown. The two of them get along from the start, and when he's finally able to get past the anxiety of moving a thousand miles away from home, Nick starts to build the beginnings of his new life in Las Vegas.For my Found Family Bingo square "first day of school/college"





	Start Again From The Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> this lays the foundation of my csi college au series, 'house rules', which details the lives of nick, warrick, catharine, sara, greg, grissom, and a handful of others sprinkled throughout, as they live with and around each other while attending the fictional las vegas state university. inspired by a line from season four episode two where catharine and sara joke about living together while investigating a death in the home of several college roommates.
> 
> mostly stage setting at this point, but stay tuned to the series, as more is coming, including several canon events transposed for an au setting. enjoy!

Austin, Texas and Las Vegas, Nevada didn’t seem like they’re that far from each other. At least, they didn’t until Nick left one bound for the other. The flight itself was only two and a half hours, but the tracking icon on the screen in the seat in front of him tells Nick that those two hours saw over a thousand miles of land covered, a distance that would take almost a day by car. As he crosses over parts of four separate states, and into a time zone two hours behind his parents’ house, by the time the plane sets down on the tarmac at McCarran International Airport, he feels like he’s in a different world. The air is hot and dry and feels much like it did back home, but it’s thinner, here. Nick stands at the curb, waiting for the taxi that’s coming to pick him up, and finds it hard to catch his breath. 

The campus of Las Vegas State University sprawls massive and imposing at the bottom of the low hill the taxi has just crested, the streets of which are lined by small to mid-sized residential homes and apartment buildings. Nick can see Greek life symbols on a handful of the buildings’ doors and LVSU banners in the windows of many more, leading to the conclusion that this is a primarily college student occupied neighborhood at the edge of campus. The taxi drops him off ten minutes later at the edge of a mob of cars, filled with students and families looking for parking spots from which they can unload. The energy of move-in day buzzes anxiously around him, the air filled with hundreds of voices, calling out to and speaking with one another. Older students in neon vests with ‘MOVE-IN GUIDE’ on the backs in massive, easily readable letters help confused new arrivals and high-strung parents find their desired destinations.

Nick shifts his duffle bag higher onto his shoulder, gripping the handle of his large suitcase a little tighter, looking up at the ten stories of Bradley Hall, the first year dorm he’s been assigned to. Someone bumps into him from the left, jostling him a few steps to the side, and Nick looks over to see a child of maybe ten or eleven years old, bolting past towards the building. There’s an older couple standing with a girl about Nick’s age nearby, and the woman gives him a sheepish cringe.

“Sorry,” she says, gesturing at what must be her young son, now bouncing in place next to the door. “He’s excited to see his sister’s room.”

“It’s all good,” he responds, flashing her a smile. “Y’all go on ahead, okay?”

The family passes in front of him and he watches them go, feeling a sudden, acute pang of loneliness in his chest. It wasn’t that his parents didn’t want to come with him on this trip, help their youngest get settled in at his school. It was that Nick hadn’t wanted them there - it was enough to manage on its own, moving into a small room he’ll be sharing with a stranger, in a city he’s only visited twice, adjusting to the first day of his semi-adult life, without having to worry about his parents on top of it all. They get along just fine, but they had been much closer when he was young, and Nick sometimes gets the feeling they just don’t understand each other too well anymore. Figuring out how to say goodbye to them at home had been plenty difficult without move-in day to make it all the more complicated. 

So when he walks through the door of the building into the blessedly air conditioned ground floor lobby, Nick does so alone. He picks his key and electronic entry fob, good for all buildings students have access to on campus, up from the front desk, and heads for the stairs. Using the elevator would be a long wait, with the thick streams of first-year students all trying to pile on at once, and his room is only on the second floor. He hauls his bags up without too much difficulty, thankful that he had taken the option to have his ordered sheets and bedding shipped directly from the school’s store to his room rather than picking them up himself. 

When he reaches the door of his assigned room, number 209, Nick pauses outside. The door is ajar, swung open inward and allowing the sound of a voice to filter out, joining the others echoing up and down the hall. His roommate must already be there, then, he assumes, leaning around the doorframe to get his first look at the person who must be Warrick Brown.

“-I know, gramma. Yes.” A pause. “I’m doing just as good as I was when you called two hours ago, and when you dropped me off this morning.” A light chuckle, as probably-Warrick shakes his head and tucks another CD onto the shelf above his desk. There’s a second desk on the other side of the room, bare and slightly dusty, left vacant for Nick. “Yeah, I know.”

Just as he’s shifting awkwardly in the doorway, not looking forward to interrupting the phone call by carrying his bags into the limited space, probably-Warrick turns and catches sight of Nick. His eyebrows go up and he waves. 

“I gotta go,” he says into the phone, eyes not leaving Nick. “I think my roommate just got here. Yeah. Thanks. You too. Bye.” He hangs up and crosses the short distance separating them, holding out the hand that’s not stuffing his cell into his jeans pocket. “Hi, I’m Warrick. You must be Nicholas.”

“Nick.” To be fair, the school’s website does have his full given name listed, and this is the first time the two of them have ever communicated directly. Nick takes definitely-Warrick’s hand and shakes it, hoping he comes across as at least marginally more calm and collected than he feels. “Nice to meet you.”

Luckily, the most awkward part of any first time introduction is over fairly quickly, as Warrick turns almost immediately back to unpacking and organizing his CD collection. He speaks while he works, asking without so much as glancing over his shoulder, “Texas, huh?”

“Yeah,” Nick agrees, moving slowly and cautiously into the room and dragging his suitcase in behind him. If Warrick isn’t going to make a big weird event of this move-in, well, who is he to question that. “Guess that’s probably pretty obvious.” Leaving the suitcase and the duffel on the floor, Nick begins unpacking the sheets and blankets piled on top of his bare mattress. Hopefully, the sooner he gets settled in, the sooner he stops feeling like he might’ve made a huge mistake moving this far for school in the first place. “How about you, are you from around here?”

“Vegas, born and raised,” Warrick tells him. “Couldn’t leave it for anything.”

A few moments later, Nick looks up from wrestling with the fitted sheet to see the other boy has walked over and is now standing next to him, expression patiently expectant. Together they manage to corral the sheet over the mattress, and it’s in this moment, the fleeting glow of triumph of a small victory won with the help of a stranger, that Nick starts to feel the tension that’s gripped him since the plane left the ground in Austin begin to ease its hold. 

Over the course of unpacking and settling into their room, Nick and his new roommate learn a lot about each other. He discovers that Warrick is an only child to his youngest-of-seven, and while Nick’s parents had complied with his request to be allowed to travel to his campus alone that first day of the school year, Warrick’s grandmother and aunt had helped him move in. They’re both enrolled in the same major program, forensic science, though it’s unclear if this was deliberate on the part of the school or just some kind of random accident of the algorithm that had matched them both into room 209. Warrick is allergic to penicillin and Nick came down with hay fever every spring of his life, with the jury still out on whether it would happen in Nevada as it had happened in Texas. 

As the sun began to dip in the sky, the day moving into evening, Nick and Warrick set out together towards the dining hall, a brisk six minute walk from their dorm building. Students stream around them, either headed in the same direction or returning from there, some seeming to just be meandering around, returning to familiar campus haunts or adjusting to their new surroundings. Nick feels at once anonymous and exposed, just one face amongst hundreds but one immediately identifiable by anyone who glanced at him as ‘not from around here’. 

“What brought you all the way out here? Lots of good schools in Texas.”

Warrick asks the question as they’re sitting down at a narrow corner table in the cafeteria, and Nick supposes it’s a fair one. It would seem that, unlike him, Warrick harbored no illusions as to the proximity of Las Vegas to Austin, and any eighteen year old moving a thousand miles away on their own is bound to have a good story for why they did it. Nick, though, he doesn’t. Not one that makes much sense anyway.

“I dunno,” he says, shrugging one shoulder. A piece of lettuce from the salad bar shreds between his fingers where he’s picked it up off his plate. “None of my family ever really left, but I needed some perspective, I guess. Figure out who I was if I wasn’t just Judge Stokes’ boy, or Tucker or Mary or Eileen or whoever’s kid brother.” Not the kind of thing someone generally says to a person they just met, but Nick figures that, given they live together now, he can be pretty cards on the table.

“I get that,” Warrick says after a long beat of silence. 

Dinner is finished mostly in quiet, and they walk back to Bradley Hall together without exchanging more than a few more words. That night, Nick lays awake in bed, staring up at the ceiling in the dark, listening to the strange, unfamiliar sounds around him. Someone is walking in the room above theirs, pacing around with light and slow but audible steps. In the hall, a door opens, then softly shuts with a faint click. Over and beside it all, he can hear Warrick breathing, deep and even, not ten feet away in his own bed across the room. It’s been a long time since Nick’s shared a room with somebody, since the fourth of his siblings moved out and they found themselves with enough rooms for each remaining Stokes child to have their own. 

It’s a little unnerving, having someone else present in the room as he’s trying to close his eyes and go to sleep, someone he’s barely begun to get to know. Eventually, Nick can’t stand it any more and gets up. He slips his shoes on as silently as possible, snagging his new dorm keys and his phone off his desk and leaving the room with barely a sound. The lights in the halls of Bradley are never off, allowing students to navigate to the central restrooms on each floor and to the elevators and stairs no matter the time of day or night. With no windows in the halls either, it’s a surreal feeling, like this stretch of airport-esque patterned carpet and off-white walls exists somewhere outside of the passage of time. 

Not five minutes later, Nick is stepping out of the building itself, a slight chill biting at his skin as a breeze rushes over his face and neck. He doesn’t go far, meandering down to the lawn next to the residence halls, and sitting down on the gently sloping grass. The campus lays mostly quiet around him, though the hum of electricity and occasional footsteps of another night-owl, behind which is the featureless sounds of life from beyond the parts of the campus he can see, doesn’t allow for the kind of stillness he’s used to. At night, in Texas, in the backyard behind his family’s home, the night is still as death and just as quiet, stretching on forever. Even the night in Vegas is different - he can see why it’s one of the handful dubbed a ‘city that never sleeps’. 

Beyond the residence halls and classroom buildings, the structures holding gyms and professors’ offices, the horizon of Sin City looms like both an invitation and an accusation, _ look what you’ve got yourself into. _ Nick can see the tops of some of the gaudy hotels of the strip from here, glittering and enticing. He’s reminded of the light emitted by some deep sea fish, pulling things from the dark of the waters in trenches towards a dazzling glow. He’s reminded at the same time of a lighthouse, of a beacon in a desert instead of an ocean, reminding the vast empty that surrounds it that there is life here, and it can be magnificent if you’re lucky. 

Just as he’s about to get up and go inside in the hopes that his few minutes of fresh air will have calmed his nerves enough to get some sleep at least before the first class of his college career the next day, Nick remembers something. He fishes his phone out of his pocket, sheepishly scanning the missed notifications. A handful from his siblings, wishing luck or poking fun at his destination of choice. One from his father reminding him that if he needs to, there’s no shame in turning around and coming back home. 

There’s a text from his mother, unanswered from earlier that afternoon, and Nick finds himself choosing that one and typing out a reply. It’s late, but Jillian will still be up, prepping for depositions or something for the next day. 

_ Like it so far? _ her message asks. _ How’s the roommate? _

_ I like him, _ he answers. _ Think we could be friends. I think I’m going to like it here. _


End file.
